Q I find it hard to get turned on without the right music playing because I feel really self-conscious when it’s too quiet. It means that I make my boyfriend pause any spontaneous sex to put music on. Is it normal to need a soundtrack to get turned on?
A You don’t, as you say, need music to get turned on. You need it to help you to feel less self-conscious. As disinhibitors go, it’s a relatively harmless choice and you are not the only person to need music to relax. Music has become such an integral part of everyday life that lots of people feel that they can’t drive, work, study or, for some, have sex without it.
Headphones have been the real game-changers. Walk down any high street and you will be surrounded by a sea of people, lost in their own musical worlds. Headphones screen out unwanted sounds, but they also cocoon us into a personal space where we can consciously match our mood to our music. Music amplifies emotion, so when we are feeling feisty we hit Beyoncé, and when we feel miserable there’s always Leonard Cohen. Frankly, unless your musical preference is for obscure German opera or John Cage, I can’t really see why pressing shuffle play is a problem — just make sure you have a great playlist ready to go.
Although we think of music as an aural experience, it has a powerful physiological effect on the body. It can act as a stimulant, making us want to dance and sing. It can make us weep. The links we make between how we feel and what we hear eventually become embedded, so over time the opening riff of Happy primes us to want to put on our trainers and go running round the park, whereas anything by Errol Brown makes us want to head for the bedroom.
It would be interesting to know if you favour music with a certain tempo when you are having sex. Although it is not an area that has been terribly well researched, the type of music you listen to affects your body’s response. Research shows that rousing music increases the heart rate and cortisol levels. It can also activate the secretion of endorphins, raise blood pressure and increase activity in some parts of the immune system. In contrast, relaxing music can lower the heart rate and blood pressure.
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The specific relationship between sex and music is unclear. For his rather lovely 2011 book Strong Experiences with Music, Alf Gabrielsson, a professor emeritus in psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden, interviewed 965 people about the ways in which music affected them. More than 70 per cent reported having a positive response to music, and in several accounts the experience of music was compared with sexual intercourse, especially with orgasm. However, only eight people in the study specifically referred to music as an erotic trigger.
In a separate study Psyche Loui and Luke Harrison, psychologists at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, explored the thrills, chills and frissons that people experience when listening to certain types of music and concluded that “transcendent psychophysiological musical moments” are remarkably similar to the experience of orgasm. They described the nerve-tingling sensation that happens when sound, sensation, situation and emotion merge into one overwhelming experience as a “skin orgasm”, a term that is much more resonant than the vernacular goose bumps. If your experience of music during sex harnesses the sensory, biological and psychological components of music, you don’t have a problem, you have a gift.
Send your queries to weekendsex@thetimes.co.ukmailto:weekendsex@thetimes.co.uk , or write to Suzi Godson, Weekend, The Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
